Watching
Charlie Rose the other night shook my world. He interviewed Mark Pincus, the
CEO of the greatest social gaming network. Zynga has just been voted Best Overall
Startup Product of 2009. FarmVille was voted their Best App. (application for the uninitiated).

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Farmville is at the
top of their popularity list. Over 60 million "farmers", more than in the real
world. Grow
delicious fruits and vegetables and raise adorable animals on your very own
farm!

Where does this
virtual interest come from? Because you can grow and harvest in no time?
Without sweat and risks like bad weather? And you won't get your hands dirty? So here I am on
my blog telling you
how we toiled the soil, brought lambs into the world, and plucked chickens.

Here I am the New Virtual Farmer's wife.

Zynga was founded
in July 2007 with the vision of connecting the world through games. Since then
they've dedicated themselves to making fun and social games for people to play
with their friends and have become the largest developer of social games on the
web in the process. Zynga games provide a platform for players to express
themselves and form deep social connections with their friends. With a
Farmville is game where you can farm with your friends, a social network. Got
it? What's wrong with that?

All these games are playable on Facebook. No wonder people withdraw from
the real world and chose an online, virtual may I say Ersatz- world? Remember
the Tamagotchiof the late 90s? Where you could raise, feed
and walk a dog? Sounds familiar? You probably guessed that I'm not a gaming or
virtual reality person. "People really need to do something with each other" (Mark
Pincus). Other games include

Apps or phone application have become a big business. Pincus'
guess is that approximately 8 billion apps have been downloaded worldwide. We
have quite a few on our iphones: Get direction, and cheap phone lines, download
books, or find a restaurant near where you happen to be. Some people are
certainly making some money on that.

To get started you link in to Facebook. Probably where you have your
friends anyway .You create an avatar. That seems to be of utmost importance.
How about a tanned skinned, big-eared brown haired guy with a green goatee in
dungarees with a purple Mohawk?

You start off with crop ready to harvest. For that you get gold
coins"without having to bother going to the market. Fallow land is plowed in a
second. You can buy new seeds at the market and sow immediately. After ten minutes,
soybeans are 2 % grown: Hey, Presto! Instant gratification!

You can actually spend money per Paypal or CC and
when you do a percentage goes to the Haiti relief fund.The background music is rather
repetitive and annoying but there must be a way around that.

Interestingly enough, Zynga has no obligation to
monitor or enforce your intellectual property rights to your User Content but
has the right to protect and enforce its and its licensees' licensed rights to
your User Content, including, without limitation, by bringing and controlling
actions in your name and on your behalf (at Zynga's cost and expense, to which
you hereby consent and irrevocably appoint Zynga as your attorney-in-fact, with
the power of substitution and delegations, which appointment is coupled with an
interest). Here in the nitty-gritty it gets somewhat confusing.

You
agree that your User Content will be treated as non-confidential and
non-proprietary and will not be returned. You should also be aware that
submissions of User Content may not be secure, and you should consider this
before submitting any information to Zynga.

No Posting Cheats, Hacks, Trojan Horses, or
Malicious Programs! There, you have been warned. Posting Unreleased Content /
Hacking Data Files and no real life threats!

According to my networking savvy
daughter, your data are not secured: They steal from you. But with a warning
along those lines here on site under Rules,
there must a real risk.

Ursula Siebert, originally a German teacher & lecturer turned businesswoman, lived in different European countries before coming to the USA. She is now a free-lance writer. Often tongue-in-cheek, she sees life and politics in the USA from the (more...)